[Note: Because of a technical issue, Kim Elena's trip photos didn't reach us. The photos included here are from visits to Finca Pashapa from the last two years.]

I just arrived in Managua, and I’m gearing up for a few days of visits to growers, followed by Counter Culture Coffee’s annual trip to Nicaragua, the Origin Field Lab, which will begin later this week.

Ahh, but I am getting ahead of myself by telling you what’s to come without telling you where I have been! I spent last week in western Honduras, working on a project: namely, to make 2010 the year of Finca Pashapa. This year marks the eighth consecutive year that Counter Culture Coffee will purchase coffee from Finca Pashapa, a 30-acre, certified organic farm owned and run for three generations by the Salazar family. This was my third trip to the farm and with every year that passes, I am more enraptured by Pashapa and its people: where else can I spend a morning learning farming techniques and strategies on a model organic coffee farm, followed by an in-depth cupping and discussion of flavor profiles and nuances with those same growers in the afternoon? The farm’s diverse shade and worm composting set a standard for real environmental sustainability that no farm I know of has yet touched, and the coffee’s eight-year record of consistent cup quality is both laudable and all-too unusual, even among the greatest coffees.

In order to maximize the potential deliciousness of Finca Pashapa’s coffee, the first challenge facing Counter Culture Coffee was to address the mysterious aging of Honduran coffee in general. Among buyers, coffee from Honduras has a unique and unfortunate reputation for tasting flat and “past crop-ish” more quickly than coffees from other countries. Most people attribute this unfortunate tendency to a problem in the way that coffees from Honduras are dried. Between the drying machines common to Honduran mills and the humidity of the Caribbean coast where coffee leaves Honduras for the United States, I cannot deny that the supply chain is rife with hazards to coffee quality and longevity.

So what is a lover of Honduran coffees to do? One answer is to accept the risk of premature aging and account for it by purchasing minimal amounts of coffee from Honduras. When we plan for the coming years at Counter Culture Coffee (long-term planning is a huge benefit of our long-term relationships), though, we always agree that the enormous potential of Honduras’s Finca Pashapa is too great a sacrifice to pay to this rapid-aging mystery. Hence, we have no choice but to resolve it! With both short- and long-term futures in mind, this year I called on every member of the supply-chain team – from the coffee’s growers and exporters in Honduras to the importer in San Francisco – to assemble in Honduras and attempt to resolve this problem, at least as it relates to coffee from Finca Pashapa.

Our group convened at the offices of the exporter, Beneficio Santa Rosa, in the mountainous city of Santa Rosa de Copan to taste coffee together and to strategize. After spending hours discussing our experiences with Honduras’s coffees and eliminating factor after factor in search of the answer to the aging mystery, we kept returning to the hot and sticky climates of San Pedro Sula – where most of the country’s coffee is processed – and Puerto Cortes – where it is exported.

It’s no secret that coffee suffers humidity terribly, and together we determined that we would address these challenges in three ways: by adding a special, air-tight bag to our coffee to protect it during its journey down from the mountains and over sea, by avoiding San Pedro Sula completely, and by setting a 24-hour time limit for our coffee to wait to embark at Puerto Cortes. We are on track for 2010!

The second part of the two-part quality project relates to the as-yet unrealized flavor potential of Finca Pashapa’s coffee. Last year, Counter Culture Coffee added a dimension to our relationship with these growers in the form of a microlot from the highest-altitude parcel of the farm, called El Lechero. Roberto Salazar – who, in addition to running the farm with his family, also supports a co-op, manages a mill, and serves on national cupping juries – has methodically tasted the coffee from each part of the farm for years. In El Lechero, he recognized an opportunity to produce exceptional coffee and the family began paying higher wages to the farm’s employees to pick and sort El Lechero’s coffee with special attention to detail. The results of that differentiation – only the pure, ripe, sweet coffee fruit made it into the lot – indubitably made a difference, and since that first tasting of El Lechero’s coffee, we have not been able to stop ourselves from wondering, “What would it be like if ALL of Finca Pashapa’s coffee was harvested and sorted with such attention to detail?”

This year, Roberto and I had an honest discussion about whether it would be possible to apply such standards across the board, and what the costs would be, and I am confident that this farm will continue to produce better coffee every year, and that we will continue to expand the scope of our partnership.

This year, for the first time, I visited farms around La Labor other than Finca Pashapa, and I met growers who belong to the cooperative that processes coffee with the Salazar family in La Labor. Roberto has been working for years to identify growers with the farming conditions and determination to produce great coffee, and to encourage organic production, as well. We believe that at some point in the not-too-distant future, these farms will produce coffee to rival El Lechero, and in the meantime, Roberto will be cupping coffees like crazy to find those special micro lotes (micro lots).

Though I spent a scant five days in Honduras, I was still able to enjoy the hospitality of Roberto’s parents, Jorge and Coyo, who never fail to make me feel like part of the Salazar clan (in a good way). With six grown children and at least six grandchildren, most of whom live within a stone’s throw of the casa paterna (parents’ house), Coyo’s kitchen is constantly churning out meals of eggs and meat from the family’s hens, beans, tortillas, and vegetable stews made from the spoils of their gardens, juice from their citrus trees, and cheese from their dairy cows. Dinner usually begins around 5:30, when the sun goes down, and I happily spend hours at their table, talking coffee and politics, gossiping about the village, and laughing as the Salazar brothers make fun of one another. As I said, we are very lucky, and as you might imagine, I can’t wait to go back.

Now then, it's Nicaragua time. I miss you all and I look forward to hanging out soon.

I arrived in El Salvador two weeks ago on the first day of the coffee harvest at Finca Mauritania! It was purely coincidental, of course, but I like the correlation because it reinforces the feeling that we have gotten the year off to an auspicious beginning. Speaking of beginnings, this trip was my first to El Salvador and to the venerable Finca Mauritania, if you can believe it. I met Aida Batlle on her first trip to visit Counter Culture in 2004, only a few months after I joined the company, and since that time Counter Culture's relationship with Aida has become a model for relationships we have constructed elsewhere in the world. Various Counter Culture Coffee employees and customers have visited Aida's farms over the years to learn about the work that goes into producing her extraordinary coffee, so I headed to El Salvador with high expectations. Thankfully, I was not disappointed.

Our first order of business was to visit Aida's farms. We stopped by Finca Kilimanjaro and Finca Los Alpes before making our way to Finca Mauritania, where we arrived just as the pickers congregated to weigh and sort the day's coffee harvest. As I crouched to take photographs of the pile of beautiful, ripe coffee cherries, it occurred to me that I felt like I already knew the farm manager, Adonai, and his wife. I have seen countless photos of the perfectly-picked cherries at Finca Mauritania, and I have shown these photos to other coffee producers from around the world, only to watch them gape with disbelief: they can't believe that anyone would invest the effort in picking such uniformly ripe coffee! I hate to echo other trip reports, but it bears repeating that Aida's dedication to quality and perfectionism is unsurpassed (and maybe unsurpassable).

Different versions of coffee perfectionism were on view at two other farms we visited in other parts of Santa Ana: first, on a farm owned by Alejandro Duarte, we saw a plot of "BLC," or Bourbon Low Caffeine, planted for the famous Illy company. The experimental variety was technically a secret until about a year ago, and if you're wondering whether I got to taste it, the answer is no: this coffee is Illy's property through and through, and, in fact, if the company decides to pull out of the experiment, the producer must destroy the plants! The second version of coffee perfectionism was yet another experiment unlike any I have seen in coffee, this time in grafting: at a lower-altitude farm owned by the J. Hill Company (which owns the mill where Aida processes her coffees) they are experimenting with grafts of Bourbon-type coffea Arabica plants onto coffea Canephora, or Robusta, roots, in hopes of improving the Bourbon's drought and disease resistance. Again, I can't make any judgments on cup quality, but I felt lucky to get a sneak peak at these experiments.

But back to Aida's coffee! This year's crop of Finca Mauritania will be the seventh that Counter Culture purchases from Aida, and each year we work together to broaden the scope of our coffee experiments and to deepen our commitment to one another. This year, Aida and I picked December for a visit because the coffee harvest is not yet in full swing, and we have an unusual new coffee-related project to work on: carbon.

About six months ago, after conversations here at Counter Culture and with Meredith Taylor of Washington, DC's Peregrine Espresso (who had just begun a long-distance, sustainability-focused internship with Counter Culture), I approached Aida with a proposal to calculate the seed-to-cup carbon footprint of Finca Mauritania's coffee and to plant trees that would sequester the carbon produced at each step in the chain. Though I couldn't give her many details—at that point, I hardly even knew what I was asking for—Aida good-naturedly agreed to let us make Finca Mauritania the carbon guinea pig and to help me however she could. Meredith and I spent months learning about carbon, researching carbon calculators, testing carbon calculators, talking to carbon auditing organizations, and following just about every lead you can imagine that has the word “carbon” in it, before creating a worksheet of our own to quantify the energy used at each step in the creation and preparation of Finca Mauritania's coffee, right up to the brewing. From gallons of diesel to therms of natural gas to kilowatt hours of electricity, I haven't done this much math since high school! As we neared completion of the energy-consumption puzzle, we realized that the most challenging information to obtain was that information coming from our supply-chain partners at origin.

Beneficio Las Tres Puertas is the mill to which Aida brings Finca Mauritania's coffee for processing—that is, everything from removing the skin of the cherry to drying, sorting and bagging the coffee for export. Understanding their operation is crucial, both from the perspective of cup quality and from the carbon-footprint perspective. The mill manager, Mario Mendoza, walked us through the ecological features of the mill, including a wastewater treatment system more extensive than any I have ever seen and a unique energy generator that burns the skins of coffee cherries for fuel. It is always important to Counter Culture to meet and build trust with everyone in the supply chain, since transparency is one of the criteria for Counter Culture Direct Trade and our model relationships. This trust becomes all the more important when you're asking for something out of the ordinary, which is exactly what I was there to do: we needed to know how much energy was used to wash, dry, and prepare Finca Mauritania's coffee for export in order to calculate the total pounds of CO2 generated in that process, and Mario was eager to assist us.

Interestingly, I have found that when I tell most people about the carbon-counting project that Counter Culture, Peregrine, and Aida are undertaking together, they are really excited to hear about it and happy to get involved. When it comes to calculating a year's worth of data for the electricity used in one of our training centers or the total gallons of fuel used in transporting the coffee from El Salvador to New Jersey, sometimes the process gets a bit stickier! I keep reminding myself—and telling all of the many supply-chain participants who do the legwork of finding the information I ask for—that when we do finally fill in the blanks, find the total carbon footprint of this coffee from seed to cup, and then plant trees to sequester the carbon we collectively produce, then we will, as a group, have made an inspiring step in the direction of real sustainability. And this group includes everyone at Counter Culture Coffee. The number of miles driven and flown by Counter Culture employees contributes directly to the footprint calculations, while energy-conservation behaviors can help reduce that footprint. It is all connected.

Likewise, we are all participants! Everyone who has had a cup of one of Finca Mauritania's coffees—including Pulp Natural, Pasa, Espresso—has already become involved in this project, and that, to me, is amazing. I raise a cup of Aida's Grand Reserve to all of us in recognition of the dedication, trust and support that makes such amazing things possible!

Straight away after my trip to Ethiopia, I boarded another plane bound for Guatemala. The timing couldn't have been better – Guatemala is just beginning their harvest season, so enthusiasm was running high. In addition, I arrived on the first of November, which is Dia de los Muertos or “Day of the Dead” in Guatemala. A national holiday where people honor their friends and relatives who have passed away, Guatemalans observe Dia de los Muertos by having graveyard picnics and flying special, traditional kites which symbolize the spirits of loved ones ascending to heaven. It's a beautiful thing, descended from Mayan tradition and rife with pre-Colombian symbolism and spectacle.

I met Jorge Recinos of Finca Nueva Armenia in Guatemala City, and we began the long drive north to the Huehuetenango region, where Finca Nueva Armenia is located. As we drove, we passed the many small, traditional villages of the Guatemalan countryside, each flying dozens of kites from their jungled hilltops. It was a sight to behold. Southern Guatemala is mountain country, and the Sierra Madre range which covers this area is dramatic and beautiful. Giant volcanoes tower over steep canyons and ravines, and the high mountaintops are home to some of the best coffees in the world.

We arrived at the farm at nightfall, and dark clouds were moving through the canyons, concealing the mountaintops where the coffee is planted. It's a funny feeling to be in the mountains when they are this cloudy – although you can't see them, you can feel the mountaintops looming above you. We went to sleep to the roar of torrential rain on tin rooftops. The next morning, the clouds literally parted, and Jorge and I set out to walk the farm.

Finca Nueva Armenia is a really special farm, for many good reasons. First of all, as any observant coffee drinker already knows, the coffee produced here is delicious and irreplaceable. But visiting the farm, I was reminded of the reality that Finca Nueva Armenia is as much a forest as it is an organic farm; in fact, the farm was declared a “Forest Preserve” by the government of Guatemala! Not content to simply leave things as they are, the Recinos family seeks to actually improve the environment of their farm, and this year embarked upon a reforestation effort to help the spread of native trees throughout their farm. Since tree-planting is such a powerful tool in offsetting carbon use and fighting global climate change, we recognized that this project was an awesome opportunity to support the local environment in Huehuetenango and, at the same time, have a positive effect on the global environment. We've made that the “good work” behind this year's Holiday Blend, and $1.00 from the sale of each pound of 2009 Holiday Blend will go to support this small-scale reforestation project. To the left is a little video of the nursery in action.

So, first on my list when visiting the farm was to see how preparations for the tree-planting were going! In short, the folks at Finca Nueva Armenia have worked all year to prepare 7,500 seedlings for planting on local mountains. Native plants of all kinds will be spread around the farm, including native trees, flowers, and vines. Once planted, these trees will offset around 375,000 pounds of carbon per year every year for their entire lifetimes! It's an amazingly powerful thing. The seedlings themselves are impressive, lined up and ready for planting over the next few months. Jorge then gave me a tour of the forest, showing me what each tree would look like when grown into an adult. My favorite, of course, was the tree that graces the holiday blend label – the native Guatemalan avocado, which towers above the farm and produces food for birds and other wildlife.

But it wasn't all tree talk. The farm is geographically spectacular, as well – it's planted on a soaring mountainside. The best coffees come from the very top ridge of the farm, and it was there we hiked. Along the way, we walked past a number of the pure-water springs that dot the property, and marveled at the view of the Huehuetenango region that one gets from the top area of the farm. This area is home to the Bourbon Rojo and Typica varieties which help make this coffee so deliciously round and fruity. In addition, the processing at the farm – at their 50 year old washing station – is like going back in time.

The Recinos family processes their coffee using techniques unchanged for a hundred years and are slow-fermenting and spring-water washing in the most traditional, handcrafted manner possible.

Towards the end of my visit to the farm, Jorge and I shook hands on next year's purchase, thereby ensuring that we all get to drink this fantastic coffee next year, too. I leave you with another little video, this one, from the top of Finca Nueva Armenia, where the best coffee is from.

Well, I promised another update. As I mentioned before, part 2 of this trip to Ethiopia was exploring the Southern Region of Ethiopia, and the coffee regions of Sidama and the most famous little coffee town in the world, Yirgacheffe.

It’s a long trip from Addis to the mountains of the Southern Region, but making this trip has always felt like a trip to Mecca for me. The landscape is heartbreakingly beautiful, and as the car climbed from Lake Awasa into the mountains of Sidama, I began to feel giddy and excited. Here is the ancient homeland of coffee, where ancient Ethiopians discovered the marvelous coffee bush and its sweet cherries, where they first dried and roasted the coffee seeds, and where the first dark, intoxicatingly fragrant cups of coffee were first shared among friends and family. Everyone in this country drinks coffee every day, and the fragrance of coffee rides along the breezes, along with the ever-present smell of fresh grass, rain, and flowers. The people of this region were known to the ancients as “the people who live in baskets” after the beautiful basketlike huts which line the roads and farms of these hills.

I was on a mission to get to as many villages and coffee mills as I could and talk to as many farmers and mill managers as possible about the upcoming harvest and the changes in the Ethiopian coffee industry over the past year. I’ve lost track of the order by now, but I wound up visiting Bagersh’s Michile, Idido, Biloya, and Fischa Genet mills; Salomon Worka’s Wendo and Koke mills; Ambessa’s Kochere mill; and a couple of smaller Akrabi-owned mills in Sidama and Yirgacheffe. The harvest is just getting underway in the Southern region, and farmers are bringing their first baskets of coffee to the mills. It’s an exciting time, especially because the trees are loaded with fruit—this season appears to be producing a bumper crop, and farmers are celebrating. Women at the drying tables sing as they sort the coffee under the sun, men chant work songs as they use their wooden rakes to wash the coffee beans of their sticky mucilage. In any agricultural community, harvest time is a celebration, and Yirgacheffe is no different. Here are a couple of videos of washing and drying taking place right now at the Idido mill in Yirgacheffe (shown above), and the Michile mill in Sidama.

I was also able to spend time with farmers, learning about coffee varieties, local coffee prices, and their thoughts about quality in coffee. I was able to thank the farmers in the town of Aricha surrounding the Idido mill for producing some of my favorite coffees of all time. In turn, I learned about the Kurume, Dega, and Wolisho varieties, which without question are a huge part of the magnificent flavor of the Idido Royal Washed and Misty Valley Sundried coffees. Which brings up the million dollar question: will Biloya, Wondo, and Idido—now famous producers of incredible-quality coffees—be able to direct-export coffee this year? Well, the answer is complicated. The good news is, they are all producing great quality coffees already, which will be tendered to the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. And, since the Exchange has established new qualifications for its grades 1 and 2, with extra quality analysis and geographical indication, it is clear that there will be some extraordinary lots coming through the Exchange.

At the same time, there exist the very beginnings of a new way of trade in Ethiopian coffee. Our negotiations at the national level created an opportunity for direct negotiations with farmers, supported by millers like Bagersh and Worka. I know it sounds intuitive, but it is actually a big step for Ethiopia, where true Direct Trade with farmers has never really been done. I was able to sit down with coffee farmer Gebede Bare at the Idido mill, and start the trust-building process that sets the stage for purchasing his coffee directly. It’s a new dawn for farmers like Gebede, who have never even thought of selling their produce directly to a roaster—they were always able to sell their coffee locally to a co-op or mill, and that was that. So, in the end, the challenges of the new system can wind up bringing buyer and farmer still closer, which is something we love. I left my business card with Gebede, and we shook hands, promising to figure this whole thing out. I popped a coffee cherry into my mouth, and tasted the effervescent sweetness of Idido coffee, fresh off the tree. We’ll be tasting this again soon.

Well, I’ve been in Ethiopia for about a week now, and haven’t written any reports yet. The reason is, I’ve been super busy! Let me tell you all about it.

I’m here wearing two hats: my first is as Vice President of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Here’s the story: Last year, the country of Ethiopia made some dramatic changes in the way they manage their national coffee sector. Coffee is both culturally and economically important to Ethiopia—coffee’s birthplace is in Ethiopia, and every Ethiopian regards coffee as part of their national heritage. In addition, coffee exports are by far the largest source of income for the country. So, when the Prime Minister decided to engage in a program of market reform in the Ethiopian coffee sector, it was a big deal. Enter Dr. Eleni Gebre-Medhin, an incredibly charismatic and insightful woman who has made market reform in Ethiopia her life’s work, from her studies at Cornell and Stanford to her career at the World Bank. Dr. Eleni, as she is known in Ethiopia, was given the task of adapting her innovative model of an African-created commodity exchange—developed to improve markets all over Africa—to the Ethiopian coffee industry. This was a monumental and controversial task, and her genius and enthusiasm has made her a celebrity in Ethiopia and abroad—she was the subject of The Market Maker, a PBS documentary, and her work has become a touchstone for economic discussion and research worldwide.

Unfortunately, Dr. Eleni’s introduction of the new Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) was marred by controversy in the coffee world. The introduction of the ECX corresponded to the national government’s tightening of regulations in the coffee industry, which had grown lax over the past few years. The market reacted with suspicion and anger, since certain coffee projects (like our favorite Idido Misty Valley) now fell outside the system and would not be possible. This all began to emerge late last year, and as chair of the SCAA’s Symposium, I was able to add an emergency session to the schedule, where Dr. Eleni came in person to explain the changes to an upset coffee industry. It was a bit of a bloodletting, but what emerged was a working group between the ECX and the SCAA to try and adapt the new Ethiopian system to the needs of the Specialty Coffee marketplace. Sound complex? It is. Dr. Eleni, myself, and a small task force have been engaged since then in work to introduce enhanced quality, transparency, and traceability to the innovative Ethiopian coffee system.

Last week, the ECX hosted a conference in Ethiopia to introduce and discuss this work with the Ethiopian coffee sector. About 150 Ethiopian coffee exporters, farmers, traders, and policymakers gathered in Addis for this important conference. I came with a small delegation representing SCAA and our sister associations in Asia and Europe. It was a huge deal here, the conference was constantly covered by national newspapers and television networks! We engaged in a busy four days of discussion and negotiation, and we achieved a lot! I am so proud to have taken part in this work, and I am especially proud that Counter Culture’s innovations in direct trade with coffee farmers had a profound effect on those who work in the coffee industry here, and our direct trade system helped provide some of the groundwork for ECX’s introduction of an innovative “Direct Specialty Trade” auction system where buyers like us will be able to purchase lots directly from farmers and farmer groups in an open, modern marketplace in Addis. Exciting!

The work itself was thoroughly enjoyable, not least because an important coffee conference in Ethiopia would not be complete without coffee ceremonies. Just before the opening remarks, the main parties of the conference shared a coffee ceremony at the front of the auditorium, demonstrating our understanding and respect for the cultural importance of coffee here. The coffee ceremony never stopped for the next four days, and I could pop out of a policy-making session at any time to sit down for a cup of fragrant, sweet Ethiopian coffee. Awesome! In the end, we emerged with a very positive and concrete set of proposals to the Ethiopian government, which will be rolled out over the next few months. If you’re interested in the details, you can read ‘em here!

I spent the rest of my time in Addis learning more about the innovative ECX trading system, which takes coffee trading to a whole new level. It’s truly amazing. I also spent lots of time with the exporting community, including our old friend Abdullah Bagersh, and new friends from across the industry. It was great to talk shop and get the scoop on what is happening with this year’s harvest, which is just getting underway in the countryside.

My final duty with the ECX was an 8-hour drive to the town of Dilla, where the ECX was inaugurating a new regional warehouse and quality laboratory. Dilla is in the south of the country, in the region known as Sidama, and we made the long trip through the dramatic and captivating rift valley by bus. We arrived to a major local event—the unveiling of this new system is a really exciting thing for the coffee community in places like Dilla. The media were in attendance again, as were local government officials, the Minister of Agriculture, and the local elders, the King and Prince of the Gedeo people, the primary ethnicity in this part of Sidama. We were welcomed effusively with dancing and speeches, and Eleni and I were given traditional Gedeo outfits by the elders to make it all official. Excellent! It was a great way to end what I’m sure will go down as a historic meeting in the modern history of the Ethiopian coffee trade. We then embarked on a series of visits and dinners to local traders, who all wanted to celebrate Dr. Eleni’s innovations and the new era of the Ethiopian coffee trade. Many lambs were slaughtered for the occasion, and we attended at least five huge feasts of injira bread, roasted lamb, and coffee ceremony. What an experience.

We all spent the night in beautiful huts in Yirga Alem, and the next day I embarked on the second part of my trip, this time wearing the hat of a coffee buyer, exploring Sidama, Yirga Chefe, and parts beyond. I’ll leave that story for the second part of my report. Until then, Bunafi naga hinabina. (May you never lack coffee or peace.)

My love for Colombia is no secret, so it is with even more pleasure than usual that I write to all of you about my recent trip to visit the Orgánica association of Popayán, Colombia, from whom we purchase our La Golondrina coffee. This is the second year that we have purchased coffee exclusively from this group, and I set off with hopes of strengthening the relationship and understanding the issues facing the growers in the coming year.

I met up with Giancarlo Ghiretti of Virmax, the exporter of La Golondrina, in Bogotá and together we headed south to Popayán, the beautiful colonial capital of the Cauca region. One of my favorite people in the wide world of coffee, Nelson Melo, picked us up from the airport and as soon as we had exchanged hugs, we began what would become five days of non-stop conversation: news from the growers, news from Counter Culture Coffee and our customers, and news of our families. We picked up his wife, Liliana, and their two children, and departed for the family’s farm, Las Acacias, which is located in the hills just outside the rapidly expanding city.

Nelson and Liliana consistently produce fantastic coffee, in addition to heading the organization of 142 families, and all of us—from Counter Culture Coffee and Virmax to the growers and even Nelson and Liliana themselves—are trying to learn the successes at Las Acacias. To that end, Virmax and Nelson agreed last year that Virmax would purchase land from Nelson in order to set up a model organic coffee farm on which they could test different coffee varietals and growing techniques. Seeds have sprouted, but it will be a few years before we taste any coffee from Virmax’s experiments. In the meantime, Virmax and Orgánica have another project progressing on the land: organic compost production.

Having proved that they can consistently produce great-tasting coffee, the biggest challenge that the growers of Orgánica face is the productivity of their small organic farms. This challenge results from the higher costs of organic compost application as well as the difficulty of creating adequate volumes of organic compost one one’s own farm to nurture the coffee plants every year.

In explaining the differences between organic fertilizers and conventional fertilizers, Giancarlo made a useful analogy between coffee plants and the human body, saying that applying chemical fertilizers to a plant is like taking a pill when you’re sick—not only does the pill include the drug compound to make you feel better, but it also has other compounds that help the body absorb the drug quickly. With chemical fertilizers, you see the coffee plant’s response to fertilization almost immediately. Unfortunately, these plants also go into withdrawal when they don’t receive fertilizer because the soil doesn’t hold onto the nutrients in the chemical fertilizer. Organic fertilizers, on the other hand, act slowly and plants respond to them slowly, but these fertilizers also build nutrients in the soil over time to make the whole ecosystem stronger.

Most of the growers of La Golondrina apply two pounds of organic compost to each coffee plant every year, which is about half of what they need, so Virmax and Orgánica want to make up the difference at an efficient, centralized worm-composting facility at Virmax’s farm. Orgánica will distribute the resulting compost to its members at a low price and use the money to fund their farmer-support activities (as well as further composting). From a sustainability perspective, this project is killer: helping a grower to increase the volume of coffee he produces will increase his income without increasing costs very much, as well as insuring healthy soil and long-term stability of the farm environment. We are excited at the progress that Virmax and Orgánica have made so far and excited to contribute directly to the costs of creating a distribution system for the compost in the months to come!

After a night at Nelson and Liliana’s farm, we jumped into a couple of days of farm visits in Timbio and Piendamó, small towns to the north and south, respectively, of Popayán where many of the La Golondrina farms are located. The generous farmers who hosted us served us delicious lunches (four in one day) and in our discussions of the environmental commitment of these growers, soil fertility came up time and time again, further reinforcing my enthusiasm for the compost project. We saw a lot of flowers on the coffee trees—which bodes well for next year’s harvest—and a good number of coffee berries maturing on the branches, as well.

Colombia is one of few countries in the coffee-producing world that has two harvests each year instead of one: in addition to the main crop, most farmers have a smaller, “fly” crop in the middle of their year. In the Cauca region, the primary harvest takes place between April and June, and the smaller harvest in November and December. In the past, we have purchased only from the primary harvest, but this year it looks as though we will have the opportunity to purchase La Golondrina fly crop coffee, as well. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? La Golondrina could be in season all year! I look forward to what this winter brings.

One of the highlights of my trip was getting to meet Manuel Melenje and Inés Borrero of Finca Villa María, who are the growers behind this year’s La Golondrina microlot. You heard it here first! Inés is a tiny, hilarious storyteller who recounted her life history to me within a few minutes of meeting me, and Manuel is equally friendly and engaged in pursuing quality on the land they work together. We have tasted coffee from Manuel and Inés in the past, but their coffee didn’t jump off the table until this year, so I had to ask, of course, whether they had changed anything about their process. Not really, Manuel said, they didn’t change anything except the fermentation, which they started to do, get this, underwater!

Underwater fermentation, though common practice in Kenya and increasingly in Rwanda and Burundi (following Kenya’s example) is almost unheard of in Latin America. Through the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that comes from coffee-driven people, Manuel and Inés heard about underwater fermentation from one of Virmax’s cuppers and decided to try it. Whether it made all the difference or not, we don’t know, but it’s an experiment worth repeating, both at Finca Villa María and on other farms!

The other highlight of the week was the all-grower meeting, if you can believe it (I mentioned previously that these meetings can be a bit boring). On the morning of the meeting, I awoke at 6 a.m. to the sounds of meringue music blaring from a "chivo," the colorful buses that serve as transportation around the Colombian countryside, and soon thereafter found myself squished between growers on my way to the event facility in Timbio that would host more than 70 of us for a day of discussion of the past year, the year to come, and, significantly, our costs of production.

Many of you will recall that Counter Culture Coffee has set the goal of using a farm’s costs of production as a starting point for price negotiation, and if you’ve looked at our Sustainability Scorecard this year, you’ll see that we’re making progress toward that goal but that more producers don’t know their costs than do know their costs. Nelson and Liliana are working hard to create a culture of tracking costs among the growers and they requested that Virmax and Counter Culture Coffee share our costs, as well. We happily complied, and this is a great example of our commitment to 100 percent transparency (which is also one of Counter Culture Direct Trade Certification’s tenets). Farmers want to know how the coffee that we purchase for $2.29/lb. ends up costing our customers $8.50/lb. to purchase and $2.00/cup in a shop, and unlike many buyers, we want to tell them! When our grower partners understand the costs of doing business and the investments we make in maintaining the quality of the coffee they grow, they can trust us and trust the relationship we’re building together. This meeting made me proud of the amazing supply chain that can comfortably talk about anything, answer each other’s questions and leave the meeting more committed to our collective success than ever.

I followed up the all-grower meeting with a meeting of the community leaders to strategize for the year ahead, then headed back to Bogotá. As I write this, this year’s lot of La Golondrina (as well as Manuel and Inés’s microlot) is on a boat bound for Counter Culture Coffee, and I can’t wait to share it when it arrives.

As we all know from our Valle del Santuario bio, Peru is a large, rugged country, and the Northern region where the famed Valle is located is distant and remote. While I won't focus too much time extolling this fact, it is entirely true, and is an important factor to keep in mind while discussing this coffee. Peru is larger than all of Central America combined (stop and think about all of the coffee we receive from Central America), and estimates of potential coffee production in Peru have been made at as much as four times more than all of Central America combined. Peru is a rising factor in the world of coffee.

Days 1 and 2

After arriving in Lima at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, the folks in our group woke up early Monday and gathered at Café Verde, for coffee and introductions. Café Verde is a beautiful café owned by KC O'Keefe, our trip leader and relationship liaison with our Valle del Santuario group. KC is well known in the industry as the originator of the term "direct trade", and as the creator of The Transparency Contract, which he trademarked with the express goal of giving it away for free use.

The members of our group included Tim Chapdelaine of Café Imports, the company who imports Valle del Santuario for us, and seven other people from companies as large as Portland's Coffee Beans International (10,000,000 pounds per year) and as small as Arcata, California's Sacred Grounds (less than 100,000 pounds per year). We were a diverse group and we all really enjoyed getting to know one another.

After breakfast, we all marched past KC's vintage 10 Kilo roaster up to his third floor cupping lab. We spent a couple of hours cupping coffees and discussing our scores using the Cup of Excellence cupping forms. This was to be the first of several sessions where we all explored the concept of cupping calibration, a very important key for delivering quality in the cup, year after year. Training cuppers and calibrating scoring was to play a very important part in our in-depth discussions and debates during this trip.

After lunch we took a two hour flight north to Chiclayo, where we met up with Elmer, the Sales Manager for Cenfrocafe, and piled into two trucks for a drive to Jaen. When we arrived at 11 p.m. the hotel had dinner waiting for us. Unfortunately, several members of our group had suffered from motion sickness during the dark 5 hour drive over twisting mountain roads, and we had a 7 a.m. wakeup call in the morning, so dinner was quiet, quick, and light.

Day 3

Up and out early, we all made the hour and a half journey by truck further north to San Ignacio, where we met at the Cenfrocafe Beneficio—the regional cooperative headquarters and receiving station for coffee. We met for an hour with the cooperative management, and were joined by a representative from a Belgian NGO who managed an office in San Ignacio and was working with Cenfrocafe on a development plan to build a centralized washing station in the very region where our Valle del Santuario coffee is grown.

This project came as a complete surprise to KC and we had a very spirited conversation about the potential merits and liabilities of such a project as he and I climbed back into a truck with Anne Costello of Café Imports for a very rough, and rainy, two hour ride to our ultimate destination of Alto Ihuamaca, one of the five communities involved in the production of our Valle del Santuario coffee.

Upon arrival at Alto Ihuamaca, we were greeted by the president of the association and led into the cinderblock building that was used for association meetings. I was very excited to meet these producers and had an opportunity to make a short speech to the 40 or so producers who made the trek in the rain to meet with us. I expressed gratitude on behalf of all of us at Counter Culture Coffee for the hard work and attention to detail that they have all put into producing this excellent coffee. I made sure to ask our two microlot producers—Yefri Pintado Huaman and Isidro Neira Garcia—to stand up and we all applauded them for such a fantastic job with their coffee. We also acknowledged Zacharias Neira Melendres, who produced last year's microlot. I presented the association president with several bags of roasted Valle del Santuario, T-shirts, and laminated copies of our coffee bio.

Along with KC, Anne, and I, our friend from the Belgian NGO made the trip to Alto Ihuamaca and gave a presentation to the farmers about his plans to build a washing station with the goal of producing "homogenously good" coffee. Unfortunately, he informed the producers, they would need to take out a loan to pay for the $300,000 project.

As you can imagine, a spirited debate ensued between KC, who is in favor of processing at the farm level, and the good doctor from Belgium. The farmers listened intensely. Ultimately, we opened up the meeting to questions and comments from the producers, and it was at this point that I realized that, while we love the warm fuzzies and good vibes of Transparency Contracts and fair and sustainable relationships, this is business, after all. The farmers were full of very organized statements, questions, and, indeed, challenges for us and—to my initial surprise—for me, in particular. As the purchaser of their coffee, they were very intent to let me know how hard they worked, and how they had no idea how their coffee would score, which made them anxious since the amount of money they made was directly tied to the quality in the cup. Initially intimidated, I quickly realized that I needed to let everyone know a few key points:

1. All of the coffees were cupped blind by their cooperative representatives first (remember the previous statement about calibrating cuppers). We had no idea whose coffee we were cupping, so there could be no favoritism, and this was a fair process.
2. While we would like to pay everyone for AAA quality or microlot prices, we can only pay them as much as we can charge our customers. The better the coffee, the more we can charge our customers. The more we can charge our customers, the more we can pay our producers. It's as simple as that.
3. We recognize that they are taking a risk by putting time, effort, and money into producing their coffee, but we are also taking a risk by buying it. While we know it is good, we are still buying containers of their coffee based on the belief that our customers will also think it's good and they will buy it. Ultimately, we might be stuck with coffee that no one wants. All along the supply chain, we are all taking—and sharing –a risk.

The final point that we all agreed upon that helps me sleep at night is that if we don't buy their coffee based on a low score, then they belong to a Fair Trade Organic cooperative and they will get the Fair Trade base price, which is a fair price, though lower than our Direct Trade Certified base price. We are not leaving a farmer high and dry if their coffee scores an 80. It's not a feast or famine situation. As Tim Chapdelaine was fond of saying during this trip, "Every coffee has a home."

After two hours of conversation in our steamy cinder block building, the rain subsided and we all headed to lunch together, continuing our conversations with reassurances that we will find the best way together. After a very generous lunch of roasted guinea pig and beef tripe stew, we all headed to Zacharias's farm for a tour and, yes, more debate about the washing station.

Tired and muddy, we drove the three hours back to Jaen (stopping several times for one member of our team to get sick from the dark, twisting, rough roads); met up with the rest of our group at the hotel for a quick, late dinner; and crashed hard.

Day 4

Up early for a breakfast at the Cenfrocafe Café in Jaen, where baristas pour latte art and delicious ristretto shots of Peruvian Single-Origin Espresso. When the cooperative decided to open a café in Jaen to showcase their product, KC sent his baristas in from Lima to work with the new Cenfrocafe baristas for several days.

At the beneficio, we spent an hour witnessing and recording the coffee reception process from start to finish, and then we focused on cupping about 20 different coffees with the Cenfrocafe cupping staff, working on cupping calibration and feedback for their new staff members. This was hard work and gave me a new-found respect for our coffee department and all of the work they do with the hundreds (thousands?) of samples they cup per year.

After a lunch of ceviche with the Cenfrocafe staff, we all headed back to cupping lab to continue our calibration with a number of samples of "experimental" coffees—sun dried natural process and semi-washed coffees.

At the end of this day, I was exhausted and had serious palate fatigue.

Day 5

This was our last day together and was the grand finale—after breakfast, we all headed to the Cenfrocafe offices to sit down with the cooperative management and representatives from various coffee communities. Mike McKim of Cuvee Coffee, Tim Chapdelain of Café Imports, and Chris Wade of Coffee Beans International were all going to be signing Transparency Contracts today with their respective producer groups. Before the signing ceremonies, however, the cooperative management wanted us all to have an open conversation about the potential merits and liabilities of the washing station project that had been such a hot topic over the past few days.

The main concerns KC and Tim expressed were:

The elimination or reduction of lot separation

The overall reduction of quality of the coffee from blending lots of various qualities

Quality issues resulting from transporting cherry long distances and delays in transport due to road wash-outs and poor weather

Debt burden taken on by the cooperative and producers

Management of washing station (using current issues in Rwanda as an example)

We also talked about the ongoing program that Cenfrocafe has taken on whereby they have chosen 120 young people to begin a training program as cuppers. The goal is to end up with 40 trained, qualified, and certified cuppers who will act as a quality control extension from our cupping lab in Durham (and other roasters' cupping labs), to Tim's cupping lab in Portland, to KC's cupping lab in Lima, to the Cenfrocafe cupping lab,s and out into the various producer communities. This is where the focus on calibration that I've been talking about comes into play—the idea is to have everyone calibrated so that we can have a continual filter from as close to the source of the coffee as possible.

KC's main issue with the washing station has to do with the large price tag. A fully-stocked cupping lab in Peru cost's $3,000. For the price of one washing station, 100 cupping labs can be built around the country and, in his opinion, this would have a greater impact on ultimate cup quality.

After these five exhausting days of talk, trave,l and cupping, I flew to Cusco for a few days of rest and contemplation. Peru is a big, rugged, beautiful, and complex place. I feel very fortunate to have been able to experience it first-hand.

Earlier this week, I had the unusual opportunity to speak, via Skype video, to a group of budding coffee cuppers in Oaxaca City, Mexico. Gathered around a conference table at the offices of Sustainable Harvest – one of our importer partners – were representatives of the 21st de Septiembre cooperative, the Union of Oaxacan Organic Coffee Producers and Processors (UNOPCAFE) dry mill, and another Oaxacan cooperative named Un Sueño de Tantos. (Un Sueño de Tantos translates as A Dream of Many, which is a fantastic name for a cooperative, if you ask me.) These farmers journeyed to Oaxaca City from around the region to participate in a cupping training, and, after we had all made our introductions and waved at our respective cameras, Clemente Santiago of Sustainable Harvest asked if I would speak to the group about what cupping means to us at Counter Culture Coffee.

I jumped at the chance, of course. I explained that we cup coffee every day. We cup every coffee that we purchase multiple times before we make the decision to purchase it. We cup with coffee growers, and we cup with coffee consumers so that we all learn to taste coffee the same way. As farmers and cuppers, they have the unique ability to connect the flavors of their coffee that result from their work in growing, harvesting, and processing coffees: any trained cupper can recognize the flavors that result from on-farm problems like picking under-ripe cherries, over-fermentation, and improper drying, but without the farmer, none of us can affect the changes necessary to fix such problems. Cupping skills will also empower them in negotiation, as they will have the language of taste in common with the buyers of their coffee.

In some ways, I was preaching to the choir – all of these folks had already made the decision to come to the week-long training. That said, the heads nodding around the table as I spoke reminded me that we can't emphasize cupping too much! The 21st has talked about cupping, a prerequisite for microlot selection, for the past two years, but other projects have taken precedence. I am so happy and proud that they've taken that commitment a step further this year!